Boys Don't Cry
by Kill Natalie
Summary: Evan lives a life of contradictions. Boys don't don't love boys, boys don't get anorexia, and boys don't cry.
1. Chapter 1

Evan is not like most people, possibly because Evan does not like most people. Currently in his Junior year of high school he makes a point of missing two-fifths of the school week nearly every week he can get away with it. He dislikes the vast majority of his peers, his superiors and his inferiors, keeping mostly to himself unless he really needs something; and even in that case he'd rather tick-tack his fingers on a computer keyboard in search of the answer rather than consult another human being for something. Possibly Evan's only acts of audacity are that he wears black from head to toe, dressing like he's perpetually heading to a funeral, and that he smokes at school, stepping out during passing periods just long enough to suck down the cylinder right to the filter; he can take a whole cigarette down in just under three minutes, or he can take around five if he thinks he deserves the break and doesn't mind being late. He drinks coffee in the morning, just after he wakes up and puts on his white-collared shirt and black overcoat; he sips coffee as he walks to school, his legs cold because his black pants cut off just below the knee and even though his black socks cover the rest of the skin on his legs he's still freezing; he buys watery, weak joe from the cafeteria after he puts his bag away in his locker, and he sucks down another cup during lunch while he doesn't eat and smokes against the concrete back wall behind the school, the one in front of the teachers' parking lot. Evan likes Siouxsie and the Banshees, Jack Off Jill, and The Cure, his wild, Edward Scissorhands-esque tangle of hair a fashion tribute to Robert Smith. To any friend, stranger, or family member, Evan is a walking, human tribute to 80's Goth Rock, from the black dye in his hair to the tips of his old, smudgy dress shoes. And if you don't like Darkwave bands sampling Skinny Puppy's "Far Too Frail" and finding problems with life, Evan doesn't like you.

His mother didn't seem to care, or even notice, his apathy and his fixation with poetry that didn't rhyme; the only thing she'd ever briefly become aware of was the old, wooden cane he'd started carrying around (he'd found the old thing in the back of his closet and, assuming it had once belonged to someone who no longer needed it, claimed it as his own to use as an accessory). He'd just come in through the front door, the walking sound of his feet accompanied with the cane a loud _thum-CLACK! Thum-CLACK_! on their linoleum floor. She watched him come in and asked as if she was curious but didn't really care what the answer was,

"Having trouble walking?"

The shortness of the cane forcing him to hunch over slightly as he walked, he answered in a voice like a dull pencil,_ "No."_

The woman had leaned her elbow on the edge of their ancient, forest-green couch, her chin supported by her fist, and had glimpsed over at him only briefly, asking, "Then why are you walking with a cane?"

Without even half a second hesitation, as if at some point he'd practiced this, he said in a pseudo-bored voice, "Because I can. Because I want to. Because I don't need to force myself to do whatever everyone else is doing just so I can feel like I fit in."

And with a slow blink in his direction, his mother asked, "…But why are you _carrying a cane?"_

He simply rolled his eyes and _thum-CLACK!'ed_ his way to his bedroom where the carpet on the floor muted the sound of his walking. In the privacy of his room he muttered to himself in the most embittered way possible, _"Idiot."_ The split from his dad left his mother caring about him only about as much as she cared about a stray cat, but it didn't bother him much; _"My parents are divorced"_ became his trump card excuse for bullshit behavior, and the only inconvenience the divide had caused that he could think of was that every other weekend and certain holidays his ability to slink off at two in the morning to underground concerts and local coffee shops was moderately hindered. In the spare room of his dad's flat he practiced making smoke rings at the ceiling. After a while he'd give up because all that was coming out of his mouth were just lines of grey, no shapes at all.

In the morning he leaned on his cane, glaring pseudo-menacingly at the coffee machine as it slowly dripped the black mixture of hot water and ground beans into the glass pot. His dad, crunching cereal obnoxiously between his molars, seemed to say rather than ask,

"So…are ya like…Emo now?"

Evan brought a hand to his forehead, clenching his eyes shut tight, a wrinkle forming between the brows. "Jesus _Christ,"_ he groaned, as if it was horribly troublesome. "I'm not a faggy Emo kid, I'm freaking_ Goth_. You were alive in the eighties, can't you tell?"

His dad munched the cereal absently at the kitchen table. He shrugged and admitted, "Looks the same to me. Do you want some cereal?"

Evan sneered, poured his coffee and stepped outside to smoke.

In the seventh grade Evan discovered hairspray, back-combing, and feeling sorry for himself for no particular reason, which carried over all the way until he was in high school. Something about having a firm distaste for pop-culture gave him an odd sense of purpose, like it was his calling, or even just a hobby that he could mull over when he was feeling bored or particularly angsty. No one said anything directly to him about it, they just talked amongst themselves in the lunchroom and the back of the classroom. He'd never let anyone know, but there was this small amount of satisfaction he got every time someone said to one of their friends, _Look at that guy! He's SCARY!_ It made him feel different, vastly different, from everyone else. And for a long time he was different, the only one who was able to stray from the throngs of homogenous pop-princess zombies and capitalist rap-stars. He was the only one. It didn't bother him too much. Just a little.

Marilyn came to him midway through his sophomore year, and meeting her was like hitting a brick wall. She seemed to come out of nowhere and slam into him right between the eyes. He first saw her standing outside the main entrance to the school building, the long, stick-like cigarette holder between her first and middle fingers, the bottom of her black dress wet with snow that had gathered and melted there. She seemed to be waiting for something. Or someone, he didn't know or really care.

He stood about two and a half feet away from her and barked in a voice that was more a command than a greeting, _"Hey."_

She looked up at him as if he was irritating and tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette. She was overweight; a mess of curves and anatomical dips and hills squished inside a black dress. "Yeah?"

Cocking his head to the side, like she was interesting and he wanted to consider her, he drawled dully, "I like your dress. It's really…" He looked her up and down. "…black."

She breathed in her cigarette, raising her eyebrow at him and looking curious. "You have a _problem?"_ A faux-gold cross on a line of thin chain sat itself on her chest, just above her long line of cleavage.

"Do I look like I have a problem?" His voice was slightly nasally. She blinked thoughtfully, her eyelashes thick and plentiful, abundant like the compact bristles on the end of a broom. Smoke curled up and out of her mouth like tendrils. She tapped the remaining bit of her cigarette onto the concrete and smashed it out with the toe of her shoe.

"No," she replied, wiping her nose on her knuckles. Goosebumps rose on the back of her arms, exposed to the cold. "I'm Marilyn," she said without looking at him.

"Evan," he said back. He pressed his nails into the underside of the hook of the cane. "Wanna hang out?"

And after a brief pause, she said, _"For sure."_

They were an inseparable duo, sans romance, spending free periods lurking in the empty gymnasium during fourth and fifth period, _scritch-scratching_ quasi-poetic words with black pen into their respective composition notebooks. Sometimes they hung out in Marilyn's silver 1980's sedan during their lunch period, every window rolled up tight to the hood, so they could get more or less clam baked on their own cigarette smoke. Evan would lean back in his seat, his head tilted against the aged, dirty fabric, and blow his smoke towards the front window. He'd cough and clench his eyes shut against the smoke around their heads, then purr softly and monotonously, like the engine of a car,

_"This is so awesome."_

Marilyn either murmured, _"Sh'yeah"_ or nothing at all; she could be a woman of few words.

A couple of times he even went over to Marilyn's house; her room was like a cave or a dungeon, a candle-lit place of warm security; a womb. The walls, as purple and dark as irises after dusk, smelled like water on roses and musk. If he spent too much time in there with her his skull would start to constrict around his brain, squeezing like a python. Every forty-five minutes to an hour Marilyn's mother would knock on the door and come in anyway, even if her daughter said _no._

"Hey, Mari, baby, how's my girl doing?" She was all crow's feet and Shirley Temple curls; all _Martha Stewart Living_ and _Good House Keeping_. She waved at him, flexing her thin, arthritic fingers in an informal _Hello._ Evan felt nothing towards her at all.

Marilyn, her back to the door, twisted around and hissed like oil in a fryer. Her curves, her unshapeliness, were conspicuous beneath the fabric of her dress, like waves, or fissures and rises in the earth. She was chewing gum. _"Mom!_ Get _out!_" She sounded small and young, spoiled and frustrated. In her aggression her brows became sharp angles above her eyes, her dainty fingers curling around the navy carpeting as if she might pull it free from its base like it was hair from a scalp.

"Oh, alright hon," she obliged with a blissful, unaware smile. Her voice was almost a soft _hoo,_ like that of an owl. "Oh, but I made some of those cookies you really love. The peanut-butter ones with the big Hershey kiss in the middle? I know how much you love those so I whipped a batch together this morning!"

"I bet they're filled with rat poison," Marilyn spat. "I'll choke and die and spit blood on your carpet and you'll leave me in a ditch for the lepers and _scum_." With a scowl on her face, over her small, pretty nose, she spit her gum into the ashtray by her side. Her mother seemed to glow pink and yellow, and chuckled like an elf, like a Mrs. Clause.

"My baby is so creative," she fawned. She looked over at Evan, who was leaning against the end of Marilyn's bed. "You kids feel free to come down later and have some of those cookies. You too, Evan, you're always welcome here."

She closed the door. He had the strangest urge to say _thank you._ He didn't.

Several weeks later, while his small town stewed in the belly of a north-western winter and they expected nothing but black-outs and snow weeks that would eventually melt their school year into July, Evan and Marilyn met the two people who would come to be the finishing pair in their Self-Pity Quartet. The smaller boy barely came up to Evan's chest, even when he was hunched over his cane. His hair was a drapery, a curtain in front of his eyes, and Evan found himself wanting to attach a chord to the side of the boy's head that he could pull to part the tresses in the middle. He wore thick, smelly black lipstick and mascara. Evan thought this looked stupid but Babybat, as he came to be known for his height and youthful looks, liked the same CDs and hated the same political figures as Evan so he figured that it didn't really matter what the kid looked like. The name 'Babybat' actually began as an insult. As The Gothic Four were making their way down the sidewalks that needed to be repaved towards whatever cheap and local place would serve them coffee and let them smoke inside, a boy of about Evan's age rolled down the window to his car as he past and yelled, _"FUCKIN GOTH KIDS. ESPECIALLY_ YOU _BABYBAT!"_ and he pointed at the shortest of their group. They didn't laugh or smile or even curse; they just stood there on the sidewalk looking dumb and confused, and in that strange moment of spontaneity, it stuck. The name was glued like dust on flypaper and if Babybat had been born with another name, Evan might have needed a clue before he remembered what it was.

But there was no one in their group, their quasi-gang, their Alternative Squad, that confused Evan as much as Dylan.

Dylan was Babybat's fraternal twin brother, sixteen years old and the quickest to complain whenever something got tough or unfair or just plain irritating. His hair was damaged and unwashed, brown at the roots where his old black dye-job was growing out, and red that seemed to explode at the side of his head like the result of a gunshot wound, lightly spotted with faded splotches of purple and navy blue; a residual morbid rainbow from his previous coloring endeavors. Dylan was like an overused razorblade: abrasive in all the wrong places and a little bit rusty.

Dylan was small, hunched and shrugging, with black nails and eyes alive and rimmed with blended, smoky golden brown. He cracked his knuckles when he was nervous, like when he stood apprehensively beside Evan as he bought cigarettes with his fake ID; he gave a sudden, brief wet cough after he smoked, and bounced on the balls of his feet when he was excited. He was weird; but not weird in the way that Evan was weird. Dylan was the kind of weird that Came With The Job, as if being part of their selective little subculture had flipped a switch and turned him into an oddball. He and his brother had attentive parents, dinner with their family, and a single Christmas at one house. Evan got his present in the mail six days after his birthday and spent two hours a week with his mother. He was the kind of weird that grew with him. His weird wasn't a switch; it was a fungus. A cancer.

The defining moment in their weirdness happened in late April, as the school year began to wind to a close. Dylan had his feet up on Evan's dashboard- his mother's dashboard, but it wasn't like it mattered. The smell of tobacco and old cologne pulsed off him like heat. They were stopped at a red light and Evan was leaning with his elbow out of the open window, blowing a line of smoke out into the night sky. His scalp was sticky with old hairspray and sweat, and he hadn't showered in about two days.

Dylan was looking out the window and he said in a bored monotone, "There's a deer."

Evan twisted his head and leaned forward. Illuminated by the headlights of the car behind him, a decomposing deer lie in a mangled pile in the grass. It's mouth open, a swollen red tongue flopped like a deflated balloon on the ground, and its rib cage open and exposed like curtains had separated to show it on the deer's chest, its open eye gleamed in the yellow spotlight like a glass ball filled with smoke.

"Oh."

"I like bones," Dylan said. "Something about them. They're just nice."

Tapping the ash off of his cigarette out the window with his thin fingers, Evan replied, "Me too." He paused and added, "But not that way."

The other boy's feet twitched and he asked with dark, furrowed eyebrows, "What d'you mean?"

He shrugged. His shirt felt loose. "Nevermind."

Dylan exhaled. "You seem…" he began, his words seeming to evaporate as they left his mouth, "…unhappy." There was a sharp clicking sound as Dylan's front teeth penetrated his thumbnail.

Now Evan asked, "What d'you mean? Of course I'm unhappy. I don't have anything to be satisfied with." He inhaled on his cigarette. Then coughed.

A sigh. "I mean more than usual." He corrected himself, "In a way that's different from…how I feel. Or how Mari feels. You feel very…empty to me."

Evan's cigarette was an inch long now; he threw it out the window. The deer was lost in the movement of traffic. "Aren't you?"

A pause. Then, "Not that way."

His boney hand out the window, he said, "I'm fine."

He lied.


	2. Chapter 2

It seemed like nearly everything was grey.

Evan's room was a cave. The color of granite. From his walls to the ceiling to the thick comforter on his bed, things were varying shades of winter sky. The crowded space was almost monochromatic; except for his coal-colored carpet, which gave the quadrilateral space the feeling of a deep and dry cave. With the rock-colored curtains drawn over the windows, it was almost a spelunking experience for Evan to stretch his long legs across his bed.

Then, at that moment, the blinds were rolled up tightly to the black metal bars that held them, the window cracked open to a January sky, and Evan sat on his knees, hunched over the open window, sucking on a half-burned stick of tobacco and spitting the smoke into the air. He winced against the wind, protecting himself from the cold with a massive black sweatshirt. With the stick between his middle and index finger, his arms stuck out from the loose sleeves like albino tree branches, the two thick bones beneath his skin of his arm prominent and tightly wrapped with thin flesh. He exhaled, the smoke coming out of his mouth in a thick cloud; he coughed. He'd have sat hunched on the windowsill with his feet on the cold, dense ground, but there was an eight-inch layer of soft snow just beneath his window. There were only two seasons in their frigid Midwestern town: winter and summer. And winter took up about two-thirds of the year.

He looked out at the immaculate snow, smooth and untouched at the surface, covering their lawn like an opaque sheet of glass. Behind the thin and brittle trees were the rough silhouettes of the mountain range that ran through the outside of their small town. Someone yelled in the distance, then laughed. The sound was thin, like a copper wire. He filled the air around his head with grey and remembered.

Evan met Dylan and his brother in his backyard. It had only been several months before, when the snow had begun to blanket every square inch of land, smothering grass and dirt. He was leaning out his window, as he was doing currently, smoking and thinking about nothing in particular. His stomach growled and hurt. There was the crack of a branch snapping and he looked into the bunch of trees that had seemed to congregate in his backyard and separate them from the house next door.

"...the street's over there."

"I think this is someone's yard."

"I don't care."

In between the white of the snow and the greys and browns of the hibernating trees were two blocks of deep black moving through the miniature forest. Evan held his cigarette between his lips and furrowed his eyebrows, straining to look deep into the mass. From between the foliage emerged the two boys, the one's burst of bright red on black hair conspicuous like a bleeding wound. They didn't see him, stepping onto his lawn and leaving deep footprints in the snow as they moved towards the street. Evan took the cigarette from his lips, squeezing it between his fingers and called in a rough voice,

_"Hey!_ What're you doing?"

Their heads snapped up in attention and they stopped in their tracks. With another horse yell, Evan called,

"Dude, this is my yard, what're you _doing?_"

The taller and older-looking boy yelled back, "We're just cutting through, change your panties and get over it."

Evan hacked up a mouthful of gunk from his lungs and spat it onto the snow. The smaller boy said in a condescending voice, "Smoking's bad for you."

"Pot meet kettle. You guys smell like a bar from _there_." He looked them up and down; entirely clad in black, the taller boy wearing large military boots and the smaller boy hiding his face with matted hair. The flecks of snow on his head gave the impression that he was covered in dandruff. Evan smashed the remaining nub of tobacco out on the windowsill, sneering.

"Whatever," the taller boy said, and he began to walk. He brushed his long bangs back and out of his face with a pale hand.

Blinking, Evan sputtered, "Hey, wait!" The strangers stopped and turned around, eyebrows at frustrated angles and cold hands hidden inside their pockets. He asked, "What're your names?"

They looked at each other, as if silently deciding whether or not to respond. The taller boy with the red and black hair looked up and said, "Dylan." He nodded to the other. "Michael. My brother."

"I've never seen you before," Evan said. He could hear his voice echoing over the trees and snow, in the direction of the barren hills, and he realized that anyone listening could hear their conversation clearly.

"So?"

He added, "This town has like, 900 people in it and I've never seen you."  
Dylan said flippantly, "We're new." He looked like a drop of ink on a sheet of printer paper; a living Rorschach test. He turned and seemed to hop from the snow-covered lawn to the recently shoveled sidewalk. Michael followed him, like he was connected by a leash that Evan couldn't see.

"Where're you going?" He called to them, raising his voice to reach them through the widening gap. They didn't answer.

He would see them again on the days that followed, still breaking the evenness of snow with their boots. On the following Monday morning, while Evan leaned out his window to smoke at seven AM, they cut through his yard again, the snow crunching and branches cracking in the morning darkness, the sun rising behind them like yoke of an egg seeping into the sky and illuminating the black messenger bag slung over Dylan's shoulder and the black backpack, stuffed with books and supplies, clinging to Michael's shoulders. They leapt onto the sidewalk again and walked in silence. Evan said nothing to them.

Evan looked out into the snow where Dylan and Michael no longer walked. He pushed his cigarette down onto the windowsill, leaving a deep black circle of burned tobacco on the wood. He didn't remember the last time he'd seen them crawling through the trees onto his yard, their little black shapes moving through the branches and trunks like beetles scuttling through wood. Evan smelled his fingers. They smelled like tobacco. He lit another cigarette.

As soon as the cigarettes had been smoked down to a tiny, charred cylinder, he smashed it out, wrapping his long fingers around a black can of cologne, spraying the musky smell over his sweatshirt, hair, pants, and the small area where he'd been sitting. It didn't completely mask the smell of cigarettes, but it did mute it, like the smell had been pressed flat beneath plastic wrap.

Evan dressed in his black shirt, his nimble fingers slipping the round, silver buttons through their respective slits, the collar pressing against his neck and buttoning shut an inch under his chin. He wriggled into his pants. They felt loose against his legs. In the bathroom he scrubbed his red tongue to kill the smell of cancer, didn't fix his hair, and used his index finger to rub black beneath his eyes.  
His mother was drinking coffee in the kitchen and said beneath the violently yellow light, "That's a lot of black."

Pouring coffee into a cup the color of tooth, he replied, "As if _that's_ unusual."

She sipped her drink. "Are you eating breakfast?"

"No." He leaned the small of his back against the counter, his free hand resting in the pocket of his black pants. His mother rolled her eyes away from him, holding her cup in front of her lips, both wrinkling fingers curling around the small thing in her hands. She looked nearly like she was glowing beneath the light above her and Evan figured that he probably looked the same way too. His mother sniffed the air, her nose crinkling at bridge, and asked, "Were you smoking?"

Even though there was virtually no logic behind it, Evan couldn't help but feel that she was asking it just to aggravate him. "No," he lied. He obnoxiously slurped his coffee. The liquid sloshed in the porcelain cup like an ocean in a storm. She sniffed the air again; Evan wanted to tell her to stop.

"I smell it," she said bitterly. "Your cologne doesn't do shit." She put her cup down. "If I find them, I'm gonna-"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," he said, setting his cup down on the counter. "Send me to dad's, inappropriate threats of rehab, kick me out." He picked up his backpack that was resting against the leg of the kitchen table off the floor by and slung it around his shoulder. She sneered at him from a few feet away.

"I don't know if I should be more pissed off at the fact that my son smokes, or the fact that he smokes menthols," she said, looking into her drink. She asked, "What's with the black shit around your eyes?" And then, with barely a beat between the questions, "Are you gay?"

He walked to the door, his dirty shoes clacking against the floor. "Yeah, mom, and it fucking matters." He opened the front door. She said something else but he didn't hear it.

Evan got to school with snow in his hair; not because it was snowing (it wasn't), but because as he was walking a group of his male classmates rushed past him and shook the snow-covered branch of an evergreen tree that had been right above his head. He jumped, startled by the sudden burst of people that had exploded next to them and the unexpected cold and wet that covered his hair and went down his back. They were bigger than him- bigger, stronger, more popular and liked and influential- and he felt angry at his own frailty. Evan imagined that if he were standing beneath an x-ray machine everyone would see that his bones were made of sugar sticks and glass. They'd laugh.

Dylan was sitting with his brother at their own little table in the cafeteria before classes began. Even though the table could easily fit fifteen people, they were the only two there; Dylan with his hands folded, fingers criss-crossing over one another, in front of his mouth and one white earphone snaking up from the music player in his pocket to his ear, and his brother viciously writing something into a notebook with a black pen. Even from a distance Evan could see the thick, jagged scribbles on the page, partially hidden because Babybat's head was bent over the paper so far that his hair created almost a wall around the notebook.

"Hey." Dylan said it without looking up and before Evan had even sat down. His brother said nothing. Evan said hello; he gripped the edge of the table with his fingertips. Dylan looked down at them and furrowed his eyebrows. "Dude, what's up with your knuckles?"

"What?"

Dylan pointed. "They're all bruised up." He made a motion with his hand as if to either point at or grab Evan's fingers and Evan retracted them. "Who's coming second best in a fight with you?"

"If I got in a fight with someone they'd break me the fuck in half, let's not try to kid ourselves here."

"Well, whatever. You can tell people you're getting in fights," he said, looking through his music player. "I won't tell anyone you're a huge pussy."

Holding his fingers under his nose to smell them, the old scent of tobacco calming and pleasant, he replied, "I don't need the witch in my house thinking I'm jacking freshmen in the face. I already got a formal complaint about my cancer intake this morning." Evan looked at his fingers.

His brother scratching away vigorously on the other side of the table, Dylan flipped his long bags out of his face and replied flatly, "Fighting's pretty hardcore, maybe she'd be impressed."

" I'm doubting that."

Dylan rolled his eyes and sneered. "Whatever. Come with me to buy breakfast."  
In a flat voice, Evan said, "I won't and say I did." He tried to sneak a look at what Babybat was writing, but couldn't make out the illegible mess of pen. Dylan huffed impatiently, and Evan almost felt that his friend was a little bit hurt. He added, "I'll buy you coffee later. Would that make us even?"

"Maybe." Dylan brushed his bangs to the side with his fingers. He corrected himself, "It doesn't matter. Forget it." He swung his legs over the seat and walked briskly towards the food on the counter across the room. Evan wanted to run up beside him, but something ugly and selfish pressed its hands to his chest and stopped him.

It was dark when Evan woke up. His arm slung over the side of a bed like an anaconda hanging from a rain forest branch, he twisted and shifted in his bed until he heard a loud buzzing, like a hive of bees had suddenly awaken. He grasped his phone, groping for it in the dark before curling his fingers around it. The light nearly blinded him as he flipped it open. There were words on the screen.

_Be awake._

He winced against the light. It was Dylan; assertive and demanding via an electronic rectangle. Groggy and disoriented, he tapped the little letters slowly, _I am._ The little digital numbers said it was almost three in the morning.

Almost immediately he got a message back. _I had an attack again._

More awake now, Evan asked how badly. He rubbed his eyes with the knuckle of his index finger, his eyelids feeling heavy and the corners of his eyes feeling thick with sleep. His phone buzzed like a small chainsaw in his palm and he opened it. Dylan said, _Pretty badly._

Evan dialed Dylan's number. The phone against his ear, his black earring clicking against the metal, the phone rang softly against his head. The small sound rang twice before it stopped completely.

_"Hello?"_ Dylan answered the phone as if he was unsure who was calling. His voice was soft and tired.

Clearing his throat, Evan rolled onto his side and asked, "Hey...are you okay?"

"Did I wake you up?"

"That doesn't matter," he answered. "What happened?"

There was a long, deep sigh on the other end. Dylan seemed to be collecting his thoughts, as if he had dropped them and they'd shattered. "It's not a big deal. I don't know why I told you."

"Shut up." Evan rubbed his eyes some more, then clicked on the light beside his bed. "How bad is it?"

Dylan seemed to groan. "I'm fucking sick of these anxiety attacks. I'm sick of bothering everyone with it. I shouldn't have told you, it doesn't matter." Evan could almost see the frustrated, embarrassed scowl on Dylan's face, the wrinkles forming above his thin nose. There was a small clacking sound on the other end, like a little tapping, and Evan knew that Dylan was chewing through his nails. Dylan seemed to mutter, "Just forget it. Please."

Without thinking, he said, "I can't."

Angry, his voice like a crocodile snapping shut on a bird, Dylan snapped, "And why _not?_" His voice felt unusually large, like it had been inflated. It seemed too big and loud for his body. Evan didn't know what to say. His insides felt both simultaneously heavy and empty. He could hear Dylan sniffle on the other line and he sounded frail.

Evan swallowed and said in a low voice, "I don't know. Maybe I think things will get better if I try? That doesn't make sense." He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and middle finger, clenching his eyes shut as if to shut out the incoherent thoughts. "I don't know. You really need to get on some sort of medication for this, Dylan. If you're not sleeping for days at a time because of your anxiety there's something pretty wrong there."

"Even if I wanted to, you know I can't," he said.

Evan asked, "Why the fuck not?"

"My mom doesn't believe in medication."

"Your mom doesn't believe in not being retarded." If Evan had expected Dylan to laugh, he didn't.

A dense quiet, a lack of speech, seemed to fill the intangible space between them. Evan wanted to say something to pacify his friend but didn't know what. He couldn't find any words that made sense. He heard Dylan shift.

A cough and then, "It doesn't matter." Evan couldn't imagine how something so painful couldn't matter.

"I wanna help," Evan said. His voice felt weak.

And Dylan said, "You can't." Everything was bitter. A large inhale, and a shaky, tired exhale. His voice had become small again, so much smaller than before. Dylan was a rollercoaster. He was the ups and downs of the earth. The silhouette of a mountain range. "I'm sorry for telling you. I'm sorry for everything." His voice was slightly muffled and Evan figured it was because his hand was pressed to his mouth as he chewed his nails down to shapeless nubs. It was past three now; nobody said anything.

There was nothing wrong with Evan. He leaned back on his pillow, his hair a tangled mess on the back of his head and his eyes blinking slowly up at the granite-colored ceiling. He couldn't help Dylan. He couldn't even empathize with Dylan because he had never been sick in the way that Dylan was and then denied help. Dylan said it was like his stomach was made of razors. His heart was the stampeding feet of a thousand hoofed creatures. Evan wished his heart would explode and his stomach would devour itself. Then maybe, for a second, he could understand pain in the way that Dylan did.

Breaking the silence, he said, "Don't."

"What?"

Evan said, "Don't be sorry."

With slight bitterness, Dylan replied, "Why _not?_"

"Because I don't wanna let you." With his hand down by his side, Evan could feel the sharp, jutting angle of his hip bone. He rubbed his palm over it and got the distinct feeling that if he pulled too hard it would break in half. "I won't let you be sorry for something that you didn't do."

Evan imagined Dylan being curled up into a little ball as the other person said, "Okay. I'm sorry. For being sorry." And then, "Thanks."

"I didn't do anything."

"You did," Dylan said. His voice was becoming softer and quieter; Evan could hear him drifting off. "Don't lie to yourself. You did." Evan wished he could reach out and pull the voice back. He imagined putting his fingers into the noose-shape and tugging. It faded away like smoke dissolving into air until Evan could only hear the faint sound of the other boy breathing. It became so quiet, and for so long, that Evan thought that maybe Dylan had fallen asleep with the phone pressed to his ear.

Quietly, as to not jerk him out of his drowsy state, Evan murmured, "I'll talk to you tomorrow, Dylan."

And on the other end, Dylan barely whispered, "See you, Evan."


	3. Chapter 3

**AN:** Thanks to everyone who's been reading. The reason I re-posted this on here is because I've found that this story is being repeatedly posted (or edited and plagiarized) by other people and I'd like to have it always linked back to me. You can also read this on my deviantART (also under my pen name Kill Natalie). Enjoy.

There was coffee in the morning to awaken his aching muscles and to serve as a natural diuretic. Evan drank a cup, emptied his bladder, felt lighter, and did a set of sit-ups before getting dressed. His bones felt as if little splinters had formed in them; hairline fractures that appeared in his femurs and fingers. Even the muscles in his back hurt as he hunched over his cane in the kitchen. His mother was watching television on the couch, her hair a mane of earth-colored bed-head, the knuckles of her closed fist pushing into her cheek and pulling her thin lips into a sneer. Standing between the kitchen and the living room, on the line where linoleum became carpet, he asked her,

"Do you think you could drive me to school today?"

She didn't look at him. The living room light was off and the flashing lights from the television played against her face. "Why?"

"I don't feel good," he said. "I don't wanna walk and you take the car in the morning."

There was a pause between them and Evan thought maybe she hadn't heard him, but then she gave a deep, dramatic sigh. "I have to go to work soon, Evan."

"I know. You can take me on the way. I'd drive but, you know, you take the car."

She pursed her lips together. The lines on her face became deep and prominent. With the television flashing they looked like deep crevices of ink on her cheeks and forehead. In a sharp, mean voice, she hissed, "Maybe if you got a job you could afford to get a car."

A hot, dense feeling solidified inside Evan's middle. "If you can barely get a job how can you expect me to get one?" She looked as if she was going to say something but Evan cut her off. "I don't need a car. I need you to drive me to school. We can barely afford groceries."

"No thanks to you," she spat, still not looking at him. It seemed she was making a physical effort to avoid any and all eye contact with him. Evan dug his nails into his cane. He debated hitting her with it. She was the one to cut him off this time, lifting her thin, boney hand and clenching her eyes shut as if to banish any thought or feeling he might have. "No, I'm not driving you. You're capable of walking. Whatever pain you're in I'm sure you can overcome it."

Evan walked to school with whining ligaments and a dark emotion that seemed to creep into every empty space inside his body. Nobody ran into him on the sidewalk or poured snow down the back of his jacket. He walked to school alone, his backpack slung over his shoulder and his cane making echoing noises with each step he took. As he entered through the cement courtyard in the front of the school building he wondered what he must have looked like to the people who had ever met him before. To the people dropping off their children he must have looked like nothing more than a shadowed thing; just a spider creeping its way along grey cement, amongst the normal children.

Marilyn was waiting for him at his locker. He thought about asking her if Dylan had called her the night before. He didn't. If Dylan had, she'd have said something about it.  
"He's not here," she said. She was fixing a lacy black glove on her chubby hand.

He asked, "What? Who?"

Pulling the tie tight, she answered, "Dylan. His brother is here but he had to go get something at his locker and he told me to tell you that Dylan isn't here today. I asked why but he wouldn't tell me." An angry crease formed between her eyes, her eye shadow a thick and conspicuous matte black. "Figures."

"Maybe he's sick," Evan offered, knowing it wasn't true. He wasn't sure why he was lying. It felt good to know something about Dylan that she didn't. Like it was something valuable that he could keep to himself.

Marilyn straightened the hem of her dress, flattening the ripples that hung down by her knees. Her calves were thick and pale. "Yeah, right." She turned and he had no choice but to follow her. "I suppose it doesn't matter. As long as he hasn't kicked the proverbial bucket I guess we'll just see him tomorrow. And I think if he had we'd both have heard about it."

Evan wanted a cigarette. "That's...one way to put it."

"I guess."

Babybat was significantly shorter than his peers; almost comically so. At his locker he stood between two other boys his age and was legitimately a full head shorter than the both of them. He looked like a small black rectangle smashed between the two. To reach the books on the top shelf of his metal space he had to almost stretch his arms above his head. Evan had silently thought that one day he was going to wake up and be a foot taller than everybody else.

Books tucked beneath his arm, he turned to the both of them. He pointed at Evan. "Dylan's not-"

"I already told him," Marilyn interrupted.

"Well, he wanted to make sure he knew," the shortest member responded. "Because apparently you're not answering your phone and that's cause for him to freak out like a little girl. I told him to put on a Maxipad and get over it, but whatever." Evan saw Babybat unconsciously tap a rectangular bulge in his pocket and he could almost feel a palpable need for tobacco, as if their similar needs were mirroring each other.

"I just forgot to turn my phone on," Evan said. Babybat shrugged as if to dismiss it.

"Whatever. He was pissed off this morning. I should have taken the day off with him." The similarity to his brother's aggressiveness was astounding.

"It doesn't matter," Evan said, knowing that it did. "We'll walk to your house during lunch."

The bell seemed to ring from all sides, like there were two people on each ends of the hall sounding massive, identical alarm clocks. The entirety of the hallway seemed to heave in a collective sigh. Marilyn kicked the floor with her pointed shoe.

"Guess it's time to hate the day," she growled; and despite the fact that she was overweight, she looked short and small when she said it. Like it was the voice of a cheetah coming out of a mouse. Babybat sneered.

"Whatever. See you guys later."

Evan said goodbye and his friends split away from him in opposite directions like shrapnel bursting away from an explosion. He stood there, feeling uncommonly isolated and alone in his old dress shoes and thrift store jacket and cane, before turning around and leaving the building entirely from the back entrance.

Evan walked for ten minutes to Dylan's house, which was quite literally directly across from the school. Hidden behind two close streets, the other boy's home seemed to stick out from behind the houses in front of it until it was nearly in the street, only about two feet of stiff and frost-covered grass separating it from the concrete. Even from a distance Evan could see it, poking out as if to check and see if he was coming. Evan popped a cigarette into his mouth and used his hands to shield the stick from the wind as he lit it with a flame from his lighter. His stomach made a grumbling sound like rocks in a bag. It felt good to have something in his mouth.

With his boney knuckles, Evan rapped on the front door. The sound was like a woodpecker tapping against a tree. For a moment there was no sound and he thought that maybe Dylan had left, gone to school (however unlikely) or elsewhere. But then he heard the dull thumping of feet against the hard surface and the mechanical turning of the doorknob, and there Dylan was; in different black pants but the same red and black shirt he had worn the day before. He winced against the sun that had emerged from the clouds, underneath his eyes puffy and tired looking. In a tired voice he asked,

_"Mm…what're you doing here?"_ He rubbed his eye with the side of his fist.  
Evan blew cigarette smoke out of the side of his mouth and said, "Heard you didn't want to come to school."

Dylan stepped out of the doorway and held the door open. "I tried to text you about it."

"I know." He stepped in. "Sorry."

"Well…thanks for coming by. Taking the day off, in _my_ experience-" Dylan swiveled his hand around on his wrist dramatically as he walked into the kitchen attached to the room by an open walkway. "-sounds a lot more fun than it actually is." He opened a wooden pantry above the countertop and pulled out a bag of microwave popcorn. "It's basically just…listening to music and watching TV all day, which is freaking _bor_ing. Do you want some of this?" He held up the bag.

Evan hesitated; his stomach made an angry sound. "Umm…I-"

Dylan ignored him and put the bag in the microwave. Evan gripped his cane. His friend lifted himself up onto the counter, his feet dangling near the floor. Dylan's hair looked coarse and dark against the light-colored wood behind him. It reminded Evan of corpse hair. The buttery smell of popcorn began to fill the air; Evan could feel himself begin to salivate and his heart flung itself at his ribcage as if bashing its head into it.

"Are you feeling any better?" he asked.

His friend sort of shrugged and scratched the side of his face with his pale hand. "Whatever." Evan didn't have enough energy to be annoyed.

"So…what d'you wanna do?" Dylan asked. He turned and reached behind himself to open one of the cabinets and take out a large plastic purple bowl, setting it in his lap and holding it there with both of his hands. On the back of Evan's tongue were the desperate words, _Not this. I don't wanna do this,_ but he said _I don't know_ instead. Dylan shrugged. The microwave beeped. He hopped off the counter and took out the bag, tearing it open and pouring the yellow contents into the bowl. There seemed to be an infinite amount of it. "I think I have some movies," Dylan said, popping a couple pieces into his mouth. "Some that we haven't seen a thousand times before, I mean."

In Dylan's room there was little light; the sun coming through the small window had been covered with cloth stapled to the wood paneling around it. With the movie playing on the TV in front of them, laying stretched out on their stomachs on the carpet, Evan's handful of popcorn was illuminating by the flashing lights. He could feel the oil seeping down onto his skin; the savory smell just below his mouth made his tongue feel helplessly limp and hungry. He thought, _don't, just don't_ but his free hand picked up a little piece between his fingers. With his front teeth he barely chewed the edge, the warm taste moving past his teeth and down his throat. The entire thing entered his mouth. Then it was gone. Evan wanted more; but he didn't want more.

Piece by piece, his handful disappeared. He couldn't even feel the popcorn in his stomach, like the food had been sucked into a vacuum of space instead of entering his digestive tract. He reached for another and chewed each piece individually, no longer watching the movie, no longer aware of Dylan; only aware of his overwhelming hunger and the need to satiate it. And when that handful was gone he got another, carefully reaching and filling his hand, not wanting Dylan to see him and feeling full of nothing but shame when his hand was left with nothing but grease and oil.

Dylan shook the remaining unpopped kernels around, bouncing them inside the bowl. _"Lame."_

The popcorn sat like a rock in Evan's stomach, seeming to materialize out of nowhere. He could feel his heart throbbing. He knew he was wrong, in the quiet part of his brain he knew that he was nothing but wrong, but it distinctly felt like Dylan knew. Dylan_ knew_ what a selfish person Evan was; how greedy and selfish and just undeserving of everything he took and didn't give back. Dylan's thin shoulder gently bumped Evan's and he felt shame and embarrassment wash over him.

"I have to go to the bathroom," Evan said, lifting himself up off the floor. Dylan looked up at him as he stood, his eyes large and his face boyish and smooth. Evan's guilt and disdain for himself seemed to flare up like a flame on gasoline.  
"Okay," Dylan said. His fingers were curled around the carpet.

Evan went to the bathroom down the hall, locked the door and turned the sink and fan on as high as they would go. The horror and pain and humiliation were bubbling up inside of him like thick, carbonated liquid. As he lifted up the toilet seat and sat on his knees he thought, _would Dylan do this? Is this how he stays so small?_ His long, spindly fingers poked into the back of his throat and immediately his stomach clenched and heaved. His face hot and his eyes wet, he gagged, brushed his knuckles against his uvula, and shamefully kept his hand in his mouth as the vomit came up.

He clenched the side of the toilet, his fingers white from squeezing, and his stomach heaved up again, another small wave of thick, white vomit spewing out into the bowl. His throat was being torn to pieces by the jagged edges of popcorn, but he kept his hand there, gagging himself, puking onto his own fingers, hacking and retching. Evan shuddered and gasped, for a moment feeling like he was going to choke to death on his own partially digested gunk. He withdrew his hand from his mouth and spit into the water, then grabbed a piece of toilet paper and wiped away the bile. He threw the paper into the toilet. Evan could see the matter his body had attempted to digest; it was thick and concentrated, looking like an excess of spit instead of vomit undiluted with only the smallest bits of food and coffee and just a little bit of water. He reached up and flushed it down; flushed everything down. He washed his hands, turned off the water and fan and used a capful of mouthwash that he'd found in the cabinet above the sink. His face was red and wet. So were his eyes. He wiped them with his sleeve. Dylan wouldn't see it in the dark.

Evan went back to Dylan's room and lay down on his stomach, the pounding gone, the rock gone. The shame, gone. Beside him Dylan moved and their shoulders touched again.  
"Everything okay?" he asked.

"Yeah," he replied, folding his fingers over each other. "Everything's fine."

"What did you wanna be when you grew up?" Marilyn's legs were stretched out in front of her, covered to the knee by her long, ornate dress and appearing uncharacteristically short, almost childlike. The carpet was especially navy, black sea-esque, beneath her snowy skin.

He shrugged. "Dunno. I don't think I wanted to be anything. I think I just wanted to stay little forever." Half an inch of crumbling ash had accumulated on the end of his cigarette before he realized it was there. Evan used his index finger to tap it into the ashtray that sat between them. The embers burned bright, a flaming cherry red, then died. He put the stick back into his mouth. "Why?"

"I'm not sure, I was just thinking about it earlier today, when _you_ decided to cut the first half of school." She bent her knees and reached down to take her shiny black shoes off. The oil and iguana-colored socks that reached up to her knees were missing the entire toe-half of her foot. Her toes were painted a midnight blue color and embellished with white pricks of color that might have been stars. "_You're_ seventeen. In some states that's old enough to screw. Practically an adult." She glanced up at him from beneath her eyelashes. "Practically grown _up_, some might say."

Evan held a mouthful of smoke in his lungs for a few seconds before exhaling out of the corner of his mouth. "Yeah…I guess," he responded. It came out quizzically, if not a little skeptically, as if she might pull some verbal trick of which he was apprehensive. Some of the smoke blew back into his eyes. They watered and stung. "I'm not sure what you're getting at."

She wiggled her toes, looking at them. "Nothing," she said, "Mm…well, nothing in _particular_. Time is a pretty vast thing. I don't think I could really think of it as a singular topic or idea." Her eloquence seemed almost arrogant, and mildly irritating. Evan used the palm of his hand to rub his stinging eyeballs. Marilyn sighed and, "Well, anyway, I was just thinking that now _I'm_ almost seventeen, and I have no conceivable idea what I should do with my future, or if I should even bother trying to do anything."

"And you think I have any idea either?" He blew air through his teeth. "_Pshh._ Yeah. I want a future, I do, trust me. But out of every person I know I think I'm the least _grown up_ out of all of them." Evan bent one of his knees in front of his torso and rested the hand holding the cigarette on it. His other leg was extended in front of his body. "It would've been easier if I hadn't grown up at all. Life is easy. _Was_ easy," he corrected.

"An _easy life_ is an oxymoron," she said, straightening the end of her dress with her chubby fingers. "But, whatever. When I was small I wanted to be a firewoman. Then some douchebag told me they knew a bunch of dykes were firewomen and for some reason that actually left some impression on me." She made a sour little face, crinkling her nose as if she'd just bitten into something unpleasant. "Sucks. I could be a fireperson. I don't have to be a little secretary or a mom or whatever."

He glanced over at her briefly. "Never pegged _you_ as one to care what other people expected out of you."

"It's not like it's my fault," she argued, her voice stubborn. "Some retard shoved that into my brain and I haven't been able to get it out since. Get me some pliers and I'll try, but I'll probably come out _brain_ dead." She said this and Evan got the impression that her voice was tinged with something that suggested she might not know which she actually preferred: retardation or willful ignorance.

Evan said mostly to himself, "Maybe I'll be a garbage man." He imagined it, taking a drag on his tobacco. "I can make everyone I hate miserable at seven-thirty in the morning."

Marilyn winced. "_What?_"

"You know, garbage trucks sound like transformers," he explained, "they're like alarm clocks for everyone."

She waved her small hand at him. "_Nonono_, not that. I mean, are you like, serious? That kind of thing seems so…_pedestrian._" He asked her what she meant, not sure if he was genuinely curious or if he felt obligated to ask. "It doesn't seem like _you_. I don't think you're that…kind of person."

"Says the person who wants to be a _fireperson_. It's not like your only two options are stereotypical woman job and lesbian warrior. Life sucks, but it's not _always_ a dichotomy."

She argued, "Well, _yeah_, but it seems like being a garbage person, living your life to collect the trash of everyone else is really…" She trailed off.

"Normal, right?" he finished for her. She didn't answer right away. She didn't need to. "It's not like I actually wanted to do that. But even if I did, I don't see what the difference is between my ideas about whatever future there is and yours. I'll end up growing up to serve somebody else anyway, and so will you." Evan smashed the remaining part of his cigarette out in the black tray, extinguishing it even though there was still an inch left. "That seems kinda like a double standard, doesn't it?"

The girl shrugged at him. "I just see a difference. Apparently you don't, what_ev_er."

He asked, "Well…like, what exactly did you picture me doing with my life anyway? I don't know anything about it, maybe _you_ do."

"I pictured you doing something cool," she admitted, "like…I dunno. Like something you would do now."

"You don't get paid to smoke cigarettes, dude."

She rolled her eyes. "Come _on_, I meant something…fitting for you. Like with music, or art. Something creative, and not totally _dull_ like living to serve other people, or working at a little desk."

"What if working at a desk _was_ fitting for me?" he asked, a little more sincerely than he'd meant.

She looked down at her naked toes. "I wouldn't believe that if you told it to me." She continued, "It would be a little sad, and for sure pretty disturbing. At least we have some time left to decide how we're going to spend our days until we _poof_-" She made a little exploding motion with her fingers, clenching them together in a fist and then flinging her hand open. "-we disappear and there's nothing left. Maybe it's just what _I_ think, but there's a place you _can_ be in, and a place you _should_ be in. The place that's right for _you._"

Evan bent both his knees in front of himself and rested his wrists on them, his hands dangling over his legs. "Don't get me wrong here, I'm getting what you're saying, but…" Evan made a circular motion with his hand as if trying to stir his thoughts. "…how can you _know_ that; or know anything?" The cigarette he'd smashed out was still smoking in the tray. The musky scent of tobacco filled his nostrils. He imagined the miniscule hairs inside his nose singeing, burning, and disappearing. "There are too many exceptions. To everything."

"Maybe it's innate," she suggested, the words coming out on a delicate sigh. "But, as if it matters. We all end up in the same place. It's not like I'm stressing over some minute detail. Life is _terribly_ short, but long enough to know that a tiny moment-" She snapped her fingers, her polished nails sweeping across the motion in a blur of black. "-has no real significance."

"Dude, don't talk nihilist to me, I get that enough from my own brain." There was a painful knot in the pit of his stomach. He took his pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and flicked the top open with his index finger. "It's like a radio station, all the time. Just a bunch of static and in between that my own voice telling me stuff I don't agree with. There's this voice that says, _I want to destroy you. It is my dream that you'll never be happy again._ And I can't freaking turn it off. I have two of these left, do you want one?" Evan took a stick of tobacco out for himself and placed it between his lips, holding it there, then tilted the container towards his friend. She shook her head and said no. He put the carton back into his pocket. "Suit yourself. You only live once. Might as well eradicate yourself before anyone else gets the chance to."

She said, "You're _morbid._" Her voice was playful, but there was something honest beneath it, like a sea monster lurking underneath the surface of an unforgiving ocean.

"And you're not? 'S like it comes with the job." He pulled his lighter from the pocket of his pants. Some time ago Dylan had taken a black permanent marker and written on one side, _BURN_ and on the other side, _FUCKER!_ He flicked the lighter with his thumb and produced a flame. " 'M just honest. And fed up."

Marilyn's dark eyebrow raised on her forehead. "Of?"

He shrugged his shoulders. The shirt felt too large. "Nothing. Everything. Petty things. I'm a cliché, I'm fed up of everything everyone expects me to be fed up with." Evan inhaled on his cigarette. There was something he wanted to say, but didn't know how to say it. "I can't imagine what people would do if we were _really_ unexpected."

His friend made a little puffing noise through her nose. "Aren't we _already?_ I don't know anybody like us. We're the outliers in this no-name town."

"Maybe," he replied, not looking directly at her and not particularly wanting to. "Hell if I know. Or maybe we _are_ just clichés, and no matter what we do everyone in the world will be one step ahead of us. There's nothing we can do that everyone else hasn't already figured out. Rebellion is _futile._"

"You're going to let the world take your middle finger away if you keep thinking like that."

He responded, "Maybe."

She huffed again, crossing her plump arms over her chest, slightly resembling a mother hen. "How sad. Evan, if I didn't know you better I'd think you were morphing into the people you've spent all these years hating."

Evan rolled his eyes, although more at the idea than at her. "Or maybe I'm realistic. Yeah, we're rebelling. What the fuck _ever._ Gandhi rebelled, too, but it's not like we worship him or something. Peter Murphy's a cool guy and all but I don't see how we're breaking the mold that he and some other people from decades ago set for us. Like, I totally dig this lifestyle and whatever, but we're just doing what everyone wants." He took another drag and tapped the grey ash off into the bowl as he exhaled slowly. "Like I said. As soon as something outside of what everyone's come to expect from us happens, the world will break. It'll splinter into a bunch of different pieces and everyone will spend the rest of their lives trying to glue them back together."

Marilyn didn't respond. She seemed to be looking into him; looking past his thrift-shop garb and directly into his brain, or his soul. Or if there was something even deeper than that she was looking into that too. She looked around her room, looking over her band posters and over the decorations shaped like bats and skulls and poisons. Evan wasn't sure if she was really seeing them or not. Eventually she said, "Even if you're right...even if you _were_ right, and everything you said had all the evidence pointing towards it...I just don't think I would care that much."

"Why's that?" He was watching the ring of paper around his tobacco turn red and burn away. He wished an autumn wind would come and take it from him.

"I like everything about us." Her rounded cheeks were pink, flustered. She reminded Evan of a child stomping their foot and crying, _You can't make me!_ He said nothing and let her continue. "And I think if we look like wolves in a crowd of cattle then I'm okay with it. Even if there are a hundred, or a million, other wolves with us."

Evan made a low _hmm_ sound to himself. He didn't know if she heard it or not. "I...guess I _kind've_ agree with that." He added, "Regular life seems…boring. As much as I wish I was the founder of a subculture instead of a follower, complaining about it is pointless."

She ran her fingers through her messy hair then looked at them. "See?" she asked, rhetorically. "I think you'd rather be who you are now than who everybody wants you to be, even if they expect what you're doing anyway."

"I feel like there's something cult-y about that."

"Cults can be fun." She said, "My parents go to church and _they_ seem pretty happy."

He responded flatly, "Funny. Can I get out of here? I feel like I'm not Nietzsche enough."

Marilyn blinked slowly and deliberately, her thick eyelashes brushing against her face. "Whatever you want, confused little boy."

He left without saying goodbye.


End file.
